Quotations and aphorisms by Andrea Seigel:

I was an anxious kid. I worried about getting homework finished, even back when homework didn't count for anything.~Andrea Seigel

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'Real Housewives of New Jersey' has taught me more about the nature of a vacuum in space than any of the demonstrations in my high school AP physics textbook.~Andrea Seigel

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Try to remember that decisions are made by individual, fallible personalities, not gods. It's hard. I know.~Andrea Seigel

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Viewers make online requests to their favorite video-making whisperers to do the things that trigger their head tingles. Everyone's needs are different. It's like an interactive choose-your-own-adventure.~Andrea Seigel

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Because teenagers don't have adult responsibilities yet, you can create your own drama, and it's a universe of your own emotions.~Andrea Seigel

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I watched the first episode of 'Survivor' in the spring of 2000, thinking I would hate it. My natural inclination steers me toward the indoors not only in my actual life but also in the settings of the entertainment I read and watch.~Andrea Seigel

The first time I ever heard professional actors delivering lines that I wrote was completely surreal and was just a gigantic moment in my life. It was just a little bit mind-blowing and completely strange to have something that had been on my computer being said out loud.~Andrea Seigel

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I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.~Andrea Seigel

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I lean toward anything with a dark sense of humor. And since I've been out of school, the majority of my books have been contemporary; basically, I like my characters to have electricity - even better, a TV.~Andrea Seigel

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My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.~Andrea Seigel

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As evidenced during my failed audition, I'm a thorough introvert who would completely hate living in a 'Real World' house. I would have taken my Ikea comforter to the confessional room and never come out.~Andrea Seigel

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I understand how hard it is to force yourself to be someone different. By the end of high school, I had taken to doing my math homework up against a concealed wall during lunch because I was tired of socializing.~Andrea Seigel

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I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.~Andrea Seigel

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I'm definitely very interested in doing female narrators that aren't typically feminine or emotional or soft - especially teenage girls - because I have such a hard time relating to so many of them that I read. They feel psychologically cuter to me than I ever was.~Andrea Seigel

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As a kid, I was only allowed to watch a certain amount of television. But once I was old enough to own my own TV, I would stay up until 4:00 A.M. watching Home Shopping Network night after night. Soft-spoken women talked about the jewelry in very detailed, intricate, precious ways, and I loved it.~Andrea Seigel

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What 'Survivor' is really about is the inescapability of your being yourself, even when you have told yourself you can be someone different for 30 days.~Andrea Seigel

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If there is one thing for which the 'Real Housewives' franchise deserves artistic recognition, it is the patient and immaculate building of a villain.~Andrea Seigel

Ultimately, criticism that 'The Real World' has devolved into a lesser enterprise comes from the viewers who came of age alongside it, not the teens of the moment that MTV has always existed for.~Andrea Seigel

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I can be like that: forgetting how hard it was to do something after I'm past it.~Andrea Seigel

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Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.~Andrea Seigel

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The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It's like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you're just visiting that mindset.~Andrea Seigel

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Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.~Andrea Seigel

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For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.~Andrea Seigel

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I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.~Andrea Seigel

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From the first Lauren Luke tutorial I watched, I was completely taken with her.~Andrea Seigel

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Old-school viewers remain adamant that 'The Real World' has deteriorated, as if the original enterprise were some pristine experiment that got sullied as the conditions in the lab got sloppier.~Andrea Seigel

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TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.~Andrea Seigel

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Irvine, being a planned community, is really good shorthand, especially in a movie or book, for understanding suburban pressures.~Andrea Seigel

I was 11 years old when I saw the first season of 'The Real World.' Initially, I was drawn to the show because it was what I imagined the adult version of my life should be.~Andrea Seigel

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I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'~Andrea Seigel

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I've dreamed of having my French bulldog become a bestselling children's heroine.~Andrea Seigel

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I've never read any of the '50 Shades of Grey' books because the Internet pre-educated me about the 'my inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves' material.~Andrea Seigel

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When I left for college, I told myself that this was a chance for reinvention. No one on the other side of the country knew that I was an introvert, so maybe if I tried not acting like an introvert, I wouldn't be one.~Andrea Seigel

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Irvine is such a safe, stable, planned community, and I'm a person who has a lot of inner longing for drama and romance. So I think in some way the structure of Irvine made me more creative because I had these boundaries, and I thought outside them.~Andrea Seigel

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I have next to no interest in makeup as a thing in and of itself, and nothing stresses me out like Sephora's salespeople.~Andrea Seigel